sovay | I should wait here for a bit. I rather like this place

Current Music: "Look Over There," La Cage aux Folles

I should wait here for a bit. I rather like this place

Richard Morant has died. I saw him in none of the roles mentioned in this obituary; I knew him as Bunter to Edward Petherbridge's Wimsey. He was younger than I'd thought from the books, but the rapport was there. I never had any difficulty picturing him as a photography geek. He was a year older than my mother and I object to this.

One of the bloggers over at TCM's Movie Morlocks has just thrown her hat into the ring for favorite mad scientist: Robert Cornthwaite's Dr. Arthur Carrington from The Thing from Another World (1951). It's weirdly heartening to see that I'm not the only person who enthuses (I wrote "blithers," but that's unfair to the blogger) about random character actors and their memorable roles, but now I have to wonder who I'd choose. After hours of dealing with fudge, fruitcakes, a plum pudding which has just finished boiling, and the molten orange apricot-glazed sponge cake I turned last night's failed batch of fudge into filling for, I think I am tending toward boring on account of brain-dead—I thought instantly of Ernest Thesiger, Dr. Septimus Pretorius from Bride of Frankenstein (1935). This is probably like being asked for a favorite dessert and saying chocolate. (Which isn't my favorite dessert, actually.) The obvious challenger is C.A. Rotwang, but apparently tonight I feel like waspish corpse-stitching over tragic proto-robotics. The Man in the White Suit (1951) is one of the best pieces of science fiction onscreen in its decade, but I'm not exclusively enamored of Sidney Stratton, I just love watching the chaos he innocently creates. Fujimoto from Ponyo (2008) is more of a magician, magnificent sea-worshipping bundle of nerves though he is. Hans Conried's Dr. Terwilliker is a mad music teacher. Bishop—Lance Henriksen, Aliens (1986)—isn't actually mad.

Und so weiter. I could go on like this for some time. (Craziest mad scientist I've seen onscreen: Dr. Emilio Lizardo, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension (1984). The man is introduced clipping electrodes to his tongue. He normalizes slightly once he starts with his plans for interdimensional invasion. Ladies and gentlemen, John Lithgow.) But at least until I wake up tomorrow and remember which standout of cinematic strangeness I've left off the shortlist, I'm sticking with one of the classics. Who's yours?

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Dr. Emilio Lizardo

oh yeah... his fractured English/Lectroid/uh Italian speech patterns...

oh yeah... his fractured English/Lectroid/uh Italian speech patterns...

"Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!"

I need to see that movie again.

I find it interesting that the Black Lectroids and Lizardo speak in the same pattern, but the Red Lectroids at Yoyodyne have assimilated theirs.

"nice pants"

The guys at Yoyodyne have been passing as human for years - John Whorfin hasn't had to, because everyone thinks he's crazy anyhow, and the Black Lectroids are only visiting Earth.

The man is introduced clipping electrodes to his tongue. I like to imagine he's in the same hospital where One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is set. John O'Connor and John Bigbooty ("Bigboo-tay!") were there (http://www.gonemovies.com/www/Drama/Drama/OneFlewFredericksonSefeltTa.asp) for a while, too, but escaped.

This is why the 1980s Extraordinary Gentlemen (http://www.comicsalliance.com/2010/04/01/top-shelf-announces-league-of-extraordinary-gentlemen-1988/) (cruelest April Fool's prank ever, but at least there's fanfic) can't work closely with Team Banzai, btw.

Your choice is certainly inspired and I would have gone with him had you chosen somebody else.

But, just for variety, I think I will go with Peter Lorre's Dr. (Herman) Einsten from Arsenic and Old Lace.

That was Einstein.

That was Einstein.

I don't think of him as a mad scientist, but I love him dearly.

(I think one of the jokes of the film must be that he's quite possibly the sanest person in it. For certain values of drunken back-alley plastic surgeon sane, I'm sure, but he's still the only character who seems to have noticed just how stupid this entire situation is: "Tell me, don't those plays you see all the time teach you anything?" He was my introduction to Peter Lorre.)

Everyone knows your favorite dessert is the Flaming Talleyrand.

*ducks*

Everyone knows your favorite dessert is the Flaming Talleyrand.

Man, I wonder if I could make one for Christmas this year. We're already making the pudding and

rushthatspeaks has put in a compelling argument for snapdragon. Is it possible to have too many flaming desserts?

Depends on how close your smoke detector is to your dinner table, but in general, no.

Depends on how close your smoke detector is to your dinner table, but in general, no.

Hmmm.

Well, the only worry on my part is that snapdragon for a party of more than four means a sustained flame, which might send enough "noxious" fumes smoke-detector-ward to spoil the effect when the Talleyrand comes in triumph into the room.

Emmet Brown's a bit too obvious, so...

Not quite mad, or cinematic, but Cec Lindsay's Dr Matthew Roney from Quatermass and the Pit; he's very, warm, humane, and energetic. Or Andrew Keir's Quatermass from the Hammer film.

Not quite mad, or cinematic,

Eh, it counts. I should have said television and anime were fair game, too.

but Cec Lindsay's Dr Matthew Roney from Quatermass and the Pit; he's very, warm, humane, and energetic. Or Andrew Keir's Quatermass from the Hammer film.

Can you get the original BBC serial of Quatermass and the Pit on DVD? I've wanted to see it for some years now—I've never seen any Quatermass, either television, film, or remake, but it's the story I've heard the most intriguing things about and I like André Morell.

I have the movies on VHS... I will see about that little button (record) on my VHS/DVD player ..

The Pit (over here, anyway) is available as part of The Quatermass Collection box set. I'd be surprised if there wasn't an American edition.

Morell is easily the best TV Quatermass - he has a debonair, forthright air you don't get in the first two stories. Though Keir has a grizzled charm that makes him as good. That story is just one of my favourite ever things.

Also, try Kneale's The Stone Tape. It covers similar themes, and it's far bleaker.

Also, try Kneale's The Stone Tape. It covers similar themes, and it's far bleaker.

I've read about that one as well. See rant about region codes.

The Stone Tape is now available from amazon.com, either as DVD (all region NTSC) or hire. This version, sadly, lacks the commentary - Kim Newman interviews scriptwriter Nigel Kneale - but it's still definitely worth seeing, even though its scientists are sane (though arguably flawed).

My favourite mad scientist? Definitely Ernest Thesiger as Dr Pretorius. It's a sin and a shame that there's no action figure version of him, to go with my Frankenstein monster, Bride, and Fritz (no Igor from Son of Frankenstein, either... for that matter, no Dr Frankenstein!). Runners-up are Peter Lorre's Dr Gogol from the aptly-named MAD LOVE, and Dr Bunsen Honeydew from the Muppets.

The Pit (over here, anyway) is available as part of The Quatermass Collection box set. I'd be surprised if there wasn't an American edition.

I wish your surprise could get me a region-free DVD player:

"Non-USA Format, PAL, Reg. 2.4 Import—United Kingdom."

Amazon claims to sell a solo DVD of the original Quatermass and the Pit in Region 1, but it looks on-demand and iffy. I hate region codes. I don't even understand what they're supposed to achieve; it's not like they drive sales. They just annoy people who care about art.

That story is just one of my favourite ever things.

This is what I keep hearing!

Crap. I'm sorry to hear that.

Herbert West, Re-Animator, as played by Jeffrey Combs in the film of the same name (and Bride of Re-Animator, though mainly because we get insane stuff like Herb doodling with body-parts while his housemate/partner Dr Dan Cain has sex with a woman upstairs--it's like he can't quite figure out why he's so upset, but it keeps on resulting in spiders made out of fingers and eyeballs that scurry around the place until stepped on). Herb remains top of my list of formative Bossy Little Nutters with glasses, the kind of guy you can't leave with a dead body for more than two minutes without him pulling out the reagent and seeing just how good that residual brainstem activity is. (Never quite good enough, but he sure does keep on trying.)

Runner(s)-up: Sexy and unreliable sociopath with a scalpel Herr Baron-Doktor Victor Frankenstein, as played by Peter Cushing in the Hammer movies, and sexy and unreliable swashbuckling virologist Dr David Sandstrom, as played by Peter Outerbridge in the Canadian TV series ReGenesis.

Herb remains top of my list of formative Bossy Little Nutters with glasses, the kind of guy you can't leave with a dead body for more than two minutes without him pulling out the reagent and seeing just how good that residual brainstem activity is. (Never quite good enough, but he sure does keep on trying.)

I need to see this already. I'm really fond of Jeffrey Combs.

and sexy and unreliable swashbuckling virologist Dr David Sandstrom, as played by Peter Outerbridge in the Canadian TV series ReGenesis.

I don't think I know anything about him or the show, actually. Tell?

ReGenesis was produced in Toronto, and follows the adventures of an international virology lab that operates as a tiny stealth CDC whose core membership is split between Canadians, Americans and Mexicans, with a side-order of at least one Iranian (I think) and a scientist of Vietnamese descent. One character (not Sandstrom) has high-functioning ASD. Their cases start out sort of real-world but then become science fiction really quickly. One of the first continuing plot threads, for example, tracks a an airborne prion plague unwittingly spread by a woman whose newborn was genetically engineered to be a living disease vector, a sort of Typhoid Harry who would probably have to be kept in a bubble for the rest of his life; Sandstrom's daughter, played by a very young Ellen Page, falls for a boy who turns out to have been cloned to contribute material to a cancer-stricken sibling (who died), and is reaching the end of his "natural" life-cycle at maybe 15. Sandstrom also at one point digs up a 1918 influenza victim and cultures pandemic-level flu, ostensibly for a good cause--he's drunk and sleeping with his team-members a lot of the time, a walking embodiment of Ian Malcolm-type chaos theory, definitely the kind of guy who never thinks about if he should do "it", just if he can do it. And then does it.

the adventures of an international virology lab that operates as a tiny stealth CDC whose core membership is split between Canadians, Americans and Mexicans, with a side-order of at least one Iranian (I think) and a scientist of Vietnamese descent.

That's awesome. I didn't think epidemiologists got to be heroic.

Sandstrom also at one point digs up a 1918 influenza victim and cultures pandemic-level flu, ostensibly for a good cause--

Given a broad-spectrum definition of heroic . . .

(Out of curiosity, does it work?)

Oh, just about everything Sandstrom does works, though it probably shouldn't. I think there's some fallout, though (just not "new pandemic"-type fallout).

Doctor Gogol from Mad Love. Have you seen that one yet? Only Peter Lorre can get away with frequenting a snuff theater (Grand Guignol with the numbers filed off), stalking the heroine, attending beheadings for the fun of it, and gaslighting his mentally unstable patients, and STILL be lovable and pitiable and the woobie of the story.

Runner-up, Dr. Rotwang, but you know about me and him already.

I love Peter Cushing!Dr. Frankenstein, but the other two got to me first.

Doctor Gogol from Mad Love. Have you seen that one yet?

No; it's one of my weird gaps. I've seen much more obscure films with Lorre, but not his second appearance in English and his first high-profile. I have no idea why.

Only Peter Lorre can get away with frequenting a snuff theater (Grand Guignol with the numbers filed off), stalking the heroine, attending beheadings for the fun of it, and gaslighting his mentally unstable patients, and STILL be lovable and pitiable and the woobie of the story.

Aw.

Runner-up, Dr. Rotwang, but you know about me and him already.

He's the guy on my icon . . .

I love Peter Cushing!Dr. Frankenstein, but the other two got to me first.

I loved Cushing's Frankenstein, but at least in his first outing (I haven't seen the sequels yet) he didn't grip me more than his Van Helsing, who is unfortunately disqualified from this list by being a totally rational human being.

We must watch this film. I know we'd been accumulating a long list of other stuff to see together, but we can get to all of that some other time. Mad Love is of paramount importance.

Mine would be Dr. Bill Cortner from the 1962 B&W cheese-ball classic The Brain That Wouldn't Die. Cortner is the guy who collects his fiancee's severed head from the scene of an automobile accident and keeps it alive until he finds a suitable body to which he can attach it. Brain is one of 10 features on a 3 DVD set of Sci-Fi Classics (including The Last Woman on Earth, Teenagers from Outer Space, The Giant Gila Monster) that I intend to watch in the wine- and T3-soaked splendor of my present short-term medical leave. Say ... isn't Hannukah coming up shortly?

Mine would be Dr. Bill Cortner from the 1962 B&W cheese-ball classic The Brain That Wouldn't Die.

Oh, God, I've seen that. It's sort of a Z-movie.

Brain is one of 10 features on a 3 DVD set of Sci-Fi Classics (including The Last Woman on Earth, Teenagers from Outer Space, The Giant Gila Monster) that I intend to watch in the wine- and T3-soaked splendor of my present short-term medical leave.

I hope the medical leave does not have anything ominous behind it, but otherwise that sounds like a very suitable way to recuperate, especially if painkillers are involved.

Ernest Thesiger's Pretorius is probably my favorite. Runner-up: Claude Rains as the Invisible Man (I had to look up the scientist's actual name: Dr. Jack Griffin). One of the few guys who could carry a whole movie with just the sound of his voice!

Runner-up: Claude Rains as the Invisible Man (I had to look up the scientist's actual name: Dr. Jack Griffin). One of the few guys who could carry a whole movie with just the sound of his voice!

I still haven't seen him! So to speak.

Oh, you must! The film has a lot in common with Bride of Frankenstein--especially the humor.

What's interesting about movie Griffin, at least (as Steve points out), is that his madness actually followed his science, rather than pre-dating it. Whereas Allan Moore's Hawley Griffin is crazy straight out the box, as far as I can tell, and H.G. Wells's original Griffin is more pissed off than genuinely "mad", most of the time.

What's interesting about movie Griffin, at least (as Steve points out), is that his madness actually followed his science, rather than pre-dating it.

Is he driven mad by some physiological effect of the invisibility, or is it just the sort of thing that gets to a person after a while?

The main component of the drug is explicitly identified as having produced madness in human subjects, which Griffin doesn't know when he starts taking it. "The drugs seemed to light up my brain," he tells his solicitous GF, later on, then goes off on a rant about how the moon and the whole world are frightened of him, frightened to death! So yeah, I think this is a weaselly way to keep movie-Griffin "sympathetic", ie he didn't know any better! Personally, I'm fairly certain this arrogant prick-hood and paranoiac fantasy always nested inside him, but whether it would've flourished without the drug and the invisibility is debatable.

Personally, I'm fairly certain this arrogant prick-hood and paranoiac fantasy always nested inside him, but whether it would've flourished without the drug and the invisibility is debatable.

The metaphor of the latter certainly carries more weight: the selves we reveal when we think we (or in this case, really, literally) can't be seen.

I agree!

You know, another interesting parallel, in context, is that there's this not-exactly-subplot in ReAnimator where you realize Herbert West has been shooting himself up with his own reagent for quite some time, probably so he can stay awake for days and Do Science. It's never explored as fully as I would've liked it to be, though it probably explains how he can escape certain plot twists and survive certain amounts of damage. If I was writing the sequel I always wanted to, it would be called Herbert West: ReAnimated, and would include a sequence in which Handsome Dr Dan tries drying Herbert out after he accidentally overdoses.

Herbert: How dare you! I have work to do!
Dan: Yup, and that work's going to go a lot more easily after you kick.
Herbert: My God, Dan, you're talking like I've been shooting smack.
Dan: No, what you've been doing is taking an experimental drug you make yourself like it's Aspirin. Did you seriously think there weren't going to be any side-effects?
Herbert: (Mutinous) There never were before...
Dan: There were, actually--you just didn't notice them. Because you were high.
Herbert: Someone's going to notice when I don't show up to class.
Dan: At Miskatonic? Please. Not to mention that one of the things you apparently haven't quite twigged to is that no one actually goes to your classes because A) your grading curve is ridiculously difficult and B) you're creepy.

Aaaaand then there's hurt-comfort as Herbert becomes slightly less disconnected from his own body, etc. All that. Followed by him getting killed and resurrecting, and some sort of variant on Cool Air. It's sad to me that both Jeffrey Combs and Bruce Abbott are now too old to do this and have it fit where I'd like it to, in canon chronology. But it'd be fun trying to figure out who you could recast with.

Well, the guy who plays the lead in Dagon (Shadow over Innsmouth only in Spain) looks like he could be Jeff Combs' son.

True, that! I'm pretty sure that's why they cast him.

It's sad to me that both Jeffrey Combs and Bruce Abbott are now too old to do this and have it fit where I'd like it to, in canon chronology. But it'd be fun trying to figure out who you could recast with.

. . . I know you really don't need any other projects on your plate, but you should do some judicious filing on this and write it.

Horatia Wint from "Imaginary Beauties" was my attempt at a version of Herbert, and considering what happens to everybody in that narrative, I sort of have. But yeah, maybe that goes on the burner, after I'm done with the book.;)

Horatia Wint from "Imaginary Beauties" was my attempt at a version of Herbert, and considering what happens to everybody in that narrative, I sort of have.

Ah. I haven't read that one.

I don't know if he's my absolute favourite, but the comic book The Goon has a supporting character named Dr. Hieronymous Alloy, who means well, but his logic is...weird. He once tried to mutate everyone in the city into fish-people -- because he figured the housing shortage would be alleviated if everyone could just live in the river - not to mention accidental drownings would become a thing of the past.

He once tried to mutate everyone in the city into fish-people -- because he figured the housing shortage would be alleviated if everyone could just live in the river - not to mention accidental drownings would become a thing of the past.

That's awesome!

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I should wait here for a bit. I rather like this place

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